


Burial Rights

by RosemarysBabysitter (TashaElizabeth)



Series: Goretober Prompts [8]
Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-16 01:20:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12332616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TashaElizabeth/pseuds/RosemarysBabysitter
Summary: A story about swamp customs. Goretober Prompt: Cannibalism





	Burial Rights

You don’t bury the dead in Louisiana. 

The ground doesn’t want them. Eventually the rivers flood or the banks go soft and the land will spit the offered bodies back up to swell and soak in the stagnant water, to bloat in the heat and sun, to be eaten by alligators and snapping turtles and white perch. Nobody wants that; you or the perch, nor the people who catch and eat out of the swamps to stay alive. You have been those people, when gator meant meat for dinner and heads and skins to sell. When you picked cattails, a different part of the plant for each season, and clover and chicory.

You don’t bury the dead. You can entomb them. Build up instead of down. Pick a stone that weathers prettily and metal that takes to tarnish. The land will still flood, the body will still come up, but you won’t have to see it. Probably.

You can burn them. Scatter the ashes on the water. Let them sink into the mud where the leeches crawl and the trees put down their gnarled roots. Or put them in an urn on the mantle and light saints candles in front of them on Sundays. Day by day the powers of gravity and entropy will work on them, sifting them out ash by ash, to drift around the house and settle on the shelves and windowsills. To be dusted and swept out the door. You could do that.

Or you can strip the bones and put them under your floorboards.

You can put your bed on top of them, move your mattress to the floor and stretch out in the darkness with them. You can listen to their pillow talk in the night and feel the worms and the flies crawling over them.

A person isn’t all bones though. You have to decide what to do with the flesh.

You can boil a pot on the fire with meat in it for dinner, though no one has caught gator for a long time. You’re only skipping steps anyway. She would have ended up in the soil, in the snapping turtles and the cattails and the clover. She was too sweet for anything to resist.

You can take her into you, as you took in her words and her grace. You can build your body from her. You can use her to make muscle and use that muscle to fight, to win, to be made mighty in her honor.

You can do this thing. There isn’t anyone to stop you.


End file.
